Four unmissable exhibitions for an immersion in images
The approach of the São Paulo Biennial is always accompanied by a veritable tsunami of art exhibition openings across the city. This year we are treated to the chance to immerse ourselves in the arts of the image, from portraiture to virtual reality.
At Espaço Cultural Porto Seguro, curated by Rodrigo Villela, the exhibition Bob Wolfenson: retratosbrings together more than 200 photographs, from the 1970s to the present, by a photographer who has literally revealed the faces of countless public figures.
It is virtually impossible to think of Caetano Veloso’s face, for example, without seeing “that” Bob Wolfenson photograph in which the singer-songwriter looks defiantly at us, one eye wide open and his forehead furrowed. (Featured at the top of this post.)
At Instituto Moreira Salles, more unmissable portraits await in Irving Penn: centenário, an exhibition organized by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It presents Irving Penn’s fabulous fashion photographs, which uniquely combined commercial and artistic photography, highlighting his many Vogue covers alongside portraits and travel series. This remarkably varied repertoire shares a single denominator: the rigor and visual richness of his mastery of light in black-and-white photography.
Girl Drinking (Mary Jane Russell), New York, 1949. Photograph by Irving Penn. Promised gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art from The Irving Penn Foundation © Condé NastTwo exhibitions currently on view offer good examples of artists testing the limits of images by reinventing technologies, from analog to digital. I am referring to the exhibitions by Regina Silveira at MuBE and Arthur Omar at Sesc Consolação.
Borders (2018), a virtual-reality labyrinth by Regina Silveira (Publicity/Publicity)Regina Silveira, a chapter in the history of media art in her own right, presents Exit. Curated by Cauê Alves, the exhibition tours the many fields in which she works. It includes prints, video and a virtual-reality installation that encapsulates this radical artist’s multifaceted practice, bringing together her long investigation of labyrinths and her engagement with cutting-edge technology.
Finally, do not miss Arthur Omar’s A Origem do Rosto at Sesc Consolação. Exquisitely installed and curated by Adolfo Montejo Navas, it explores the boundaries of perceiving the invisible and the visible through an enchanting variety of approaches to portraying the face.
Photograph included in Arthur Omar’s exhibition A Origem do Rosto at Sesc ConsolaçãoMoving from figuration to abstraction, as critic Ivana Bentes noted in a text about the exhibition, Arthur Omar makes faces emerge from exploding water and disappear into layers that superimpose landscape on faces, as in Limbo, a series produced from images he took in Afghanistan.
The exhibition also offers an opportunity to revisit his landmark series, Antropologia da Face Gloriosa, begun in 1973, a unique record of Carnival ecstasy to which he has returned many times, using various analog and digital methods. After all, as the artist says: “the face is an open work.”
Transcript of Giselle Beiguelman’s Ouvir Imagens column, broadcast every Monday at 8 a.m. on Rádio USP (93.7 FM).
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